Moonlit Spiral: Mango

Thought I'd end the work week by sharing the last remaining treasure hunter in my main cast of characters for THE MOONLIT SPIRAL.

I feel like every good adventure story should have at least one cute, little pet-like creature. Mostly because they are fun to draw (and, to quote the great Yogurt, they make for great merchandising)! I was thinking of what kind of creature would work for my story but not feel shoe-horned into it, eventually coming up with this idea of a critter made of a tacky, jello-like substance. After all, my boys loved playing with slime just as much as their toy animals; Why not combine those two things? Plus, a stretchy, slime-based character might be useful on a treasure hunt.

Here's a bit about Mango from my proposal to then potential publishers:

AGE: 1 day old

The buoyant...offspring?…extension? (Rion and his friends are not completely sure)…of Globby, a one-of-a-kind creature called a globlet made almost entirely of an orange gelatin substance. Lovable and eager to please, Mango is able stretch and slip his small body into hard to reach places—as well as stick and make impressions of objects—making him a valuable friend when it comes to treasure hunting.

So Globby, who's mentioned above, was my first pass of this gelatin creature. She was a lot bigger than Mango and well, blobbier. Also I didn't even realize she was a "she" until much later working on the story. I didn't even know her name was Globby. I just called her "a globlet." Here are some early sketches:

I was so confident in this "brilliant" blobby creature being a permanent addition to the cast I even drew her into my very first test pages. This was where I very quickly discovered BIG was not necessarily BETTER. Globby was slow, lazy, lacked expression, and honestly not very easy to draw. The needs of the story, not to mention my literary agent telling me Globby was going to be a really difficult sell, got me rethinking her design.

Thankfully, I had a doodle sheet of various creatures that could potentially show up in the comic and realized--with a bit of refining--one of them would work out even better. I colored Mango below so he stands out among them all.

Funny enough, only a handful of these critters show up in the actual book. They were still fun to scribble up though.

Mango has honestly been a joy to write and draw. He adds some much needed comfort and humor to scenes that could benefit from those things and has helped me come up with creative solutions to a few treasure hunting puzzles that the young hunters face up against.

And in the off chance you were sitting here reading this lamenting the loss of Globby, don't fret! Her entire sequence in the sample pages I sent to publishers miraculously made it all the way to my final draft. I'm thinking about sharing that sixteen-page pitch (pre-changes) in a later post. :)

Have a great weekend!

🧡